THE HOBBIT MOVIE
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Tomorrow is December Fool’s Day in this region of Middle Earth …. Perhaps the Master Archer has advanced a bit …….. but I recall that their area is held over the April Fools’ Day ……
In all Spanish versions (extended or not) the golden figure appears ……
Ah, so the Archer has found one of those fan edits? hmm, I am sort of looking forward to someone making a single fan edit of the entire trilogy – a single three and a half hour epic, rather than 8 hours of drudgery
The Galadriel sequence does sort of raise the notion that the War of the Ring was not “the White Council make a last desperate play to banish Sauron once and for all” but rather Galadriel saying “don’t make me come down there and beat the snot out of you, you vile little lickspittle.”
I’d also echo what Turambar says: it is a film heavily influenced by 1980s fantasy. Warhammer is itself an outgrowth of Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons started as a weird “piss take” which gleefully stole from any material that wasn’t nailed down. It stole just enough from Middle-earth to create a sort of mainstream concept of fantasy which had little enough to do with Tolkien, but created a cultural archetype of what Tolkien-like fantasy should look like. Ever since: Orcs and Goblins are somehow different, are sometimes green, Elves are pretty Vulcan things that live in woods, Dwarves have Scottish accents. In Tolkien Orcs and Goblins are the same thing, Elves are recovering genocidal demi-gods, and Dwarves are a sort of group of Jewish vikings. The Fellowship of the Ring, as a film, was both highly respectful of the source material and able to look past the “D+D-mainstream” fantasy concepts. It married the storyline to historical war films. In set design and scene construction, it went for something grounded, earthy and even dirty. It had Gladiator and Braveheart in its DNA. When the fantastic occurred, it soared out of the grounded world into the ethereal and did so very effectively. It was like nothing else before or since. It was respectful, controlled, creative.
What was harder to spot, even though its pretty obvious now, is that the films borrowed very heavily from that sort of D+D mainstream set of conceits, in much the same way as Warcraft or Warhammer might. Cultures could not be subtly different. They had to be very, clearly, obviously different. In Return of the King, we see a 7th Century Vendel culture live right alongside an almost Renaissance one. The effect was jarring, but maybe it was a once off. Or perhaps a twice off: note how Saruman’s armies are created as an industrial process. These jarring effects served the source material somewhat, and there was no need to linger. But now, after six films, we can look back and see how everything is created in a very broad strokes fashion, and how it heavily relies on D+D esque visual tropes to draw those broad strokes. Thorin gives Bilbo a mithril mail shirt…while he himself dons armour from high fantasy illustrations. Traditional weapon design in the Fellowship becomes iconic and impractical, a way of visually differentiating the Dwarves in the Hobbit films. Holistically designed Mordor orcs wearing scraps become tyrannical armies of identically armoured villains in the Hobbit. All the tricks D+D/Warhammer/Warcraft et al use to differentiate scenes and cultures are in full force in the films; it seems the Fellowship of the Ring was a glorious exception.
While I can appreciate the sort of pressures that drove these decisions, it does strike me that some opportunity for something greater and more timeless was lost. In twenty years, Fellowship of the Ring will still stand as an example of fantasy film making at its absolute finest; I doubt the Hobbit films will be so loved.
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